5 January 2024. Geopolitics | Time

The end of the idea of peace through interdependence // Keeping time through variable hours. [#529]

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1: The end of the idea of peace through economic interdependence

Adam Tooze has had a couple of articles over the holiday period assessing his view of geopolitics at the end of 2023. One of these is (I think) behind the paywall at the Financial Times, the other a free article on his partially paywalled Chartbook newsletter.

The first observation in the Chartbook place is that it is evidentially true that the number of wars is increasing. Even before the Israel-Gaza war started, the Institute for Strategic Studies documented 183 current conflicts around the world—the highest number in three decades. (Steven Pinker’s sunny optimism maybe takes a bit of a dent here.)

(Source: Vision of Humanity)

Specifically, the growth in conflict has come from what he and Visions of Humanity, where the chart comes from, calls ‘internationalised intrastate conflicts’. Tooze observes that these are all driven by local issues, but they are also what I think these would have once been called ‘proxy wars’, except that are within nations:

It is not just “western weakness”, but the new rivalry between the US, Russia, China and regional players like the Emirates and Saudi Arabia that is fueling these conflicts. The fighting is escalated by wider global and international forces, but the wider ramifications of the conflicts themselves are relatively limited.

It is worth separating out these different conflicts, as Tooze does in the article.

The conflict between China and the United States is described by American policy makers as being a “new Cold War”, but in practice it works rather differently. The Cold War between America and Russia was largely around territory, and played out explicitly or implicitly through military reach.

Tooze points to an open access article that argues that the great power conflict between America and China is instead being played out in global networks of different kinds, as argued in an (open access) article in Geopolitics:

the US and China currently compete on a global scale for centrality in four interrelated networks that they anticipate will underpin hegemony in the 21st century: infrastructure (e.g. logistics and energy), digital, production and finance.

Read like this, this suggests to me that this geopolitical competition can be seen as a product of a globalised world in which the principles of Manuel Castells’ ‘network society’ hold sway. It’s also a bit like a complex strategy game in which a move using one type of network is countered by responding with another type, as the Geopolitics authors argue:

Both Washington and Beijing leverage power in one network as they seek to gain advantages in other networks. For example, the US has scrambled to respond to the BRI by identifying new financial modalities capable of delivering the capital for infrastructure on a comparable scale. In other words, the US seeks to undermine China’s privileged position in infrastructure networks by leveraging its power in financial networks. Similarly, China seeks to augment its formidable position within digital networks by enhancing payment systems and the digital yuan project, which serves to internationalise the RMB.

But as the Geopolitics authors conclude, it’s not a ‘war’ that anyone is going to win. And it’s also a conflict that doesn’t necessarily demand that other countries pick sides.

Next: Russia-Ukraine. The war is a product, Tooze suggests, of what he calls the “unresolved tensions” of the 1990s and 2000s, and what you might otherwise think of as the botched transition out of the Cold War and the “shock therapy” of rapid mass privatisation:

Of the major post Cold War great power clashes, it broke into the open first, initially with Russo-Georgian war of 2008 and then in Ukraine in 2013-2014.

On the Israel-Gaza war, Tooze constructs an argument that I have not seen elsewhere. This takes the framing of the conflict back into the political attitudes of Europe in the late 19th and early 20th century. I’ve left this quote from Tooze’s article deliberately long so it is not misunderstood:

Zionism has to be understood as a product of its era i.e. as a settler-colonial project, typical of European global thinking in the late 19th and early 20th century. What is distinctive about it, is that the Israelis are the last group of (mainly) Europeans to engage in the wholesale arrogation of non-European land, justified in their mission by theology, claims to civilizational superiority and nationalism. Of course, land grabs go on, all over the world, all the time. But, in the present day, the Israeli project is uniquely coherent and uniquely unapologetic as an instance of “classic” settler-colonial ideology.

On this reading, the creation of Israel is part of a huge and violent process of ethnic cleansing, as part of the creation of new homogenous nation states. Tooze quotes the historian Alon Confino:

The expulsion of ethnic groups continued until 1948 and expanded beyond Europe to India and Pakistan. These expulsions were part of a larger European process whereby the borderlands of the Austro-Hungarian, German, Russian, and Ottoman Empires, geographical areas of multiethnic co-existence, turned in the first half of the twentieth century into a locus of ethnic cleansing and genocides in state-authorized suppression of ethnoreligious difference. Palestine was part of this wider process.

(Major episodes of forced displacement between 1900-2021. The tags reference the significant conflicts within the bar chart totals. Source: Charnysh, 2022)

Tooze notes that other conflicts that originated in the 1940s are still live (or frozen) conflicts, in Burma, in Korea, between China and Taiwan. Israel and Palestine is not unique in this:

The fact that the Israel-Palestine conflict has continued since the 1940s makes it no exception. What is exceptional is the intensity of the violence and the complicity of Western powers with Israel’s ongoing settler-colonialism.

Tooze’s conclusion, more concisely developed in the FT, is that all of this means that the single idea that dominated geopolitics in the post-Cold War era is now conclusively dead. Economics hasn’t tamed geopolitics. History hasn’t ended:

From the 1990s onwards, “Wandel durch handel” (transformation through trade) was the maxim of policymakers across the west. Under the Washington consensus and America’s military dominance there was a confident belief that geopolitics were either irrelevant or would be tamed by economic development. At its peak in 2021 the stock of foreign direct investment in Russia reached $500bn.

Similarly, a succession of American Presidents, including Clinton, Bush and Obama, all tried to pursue a policy of rapprochement with China by integrating the two countries’ economies in the so-called “Chimerica” project. Shimon Peres, meanwhile, promoted a view of the Middle East in which economic interdependence healed the divisions in the region—as they had done in post-war Europe.

These economic strategies have not had the intended effects. Russia’s pipelines to Europe paid for its military effort; China is so deeply integrated into the US economy that it would be all but impossible to sanction; Israel has used its technology development to build up its foreign reserves.

Economic growth thus breeds not peace but the means to rivalry. Meanwhile, economic weakness generates vulnerability... The mistake was not in believing that economic interconnection produces real social, economic and political change. It did. The mistake was to imagine that this transformation was a one-way process that would automatically secure order — and that order would be to the liking of the west.

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2: Keeping time with variable hours

I’m always interested in cross-cultural stories that make me reflect on things that are completely normalised in modern culture, and one of these popped up in JSTOR Daily over the holiday, wrapped up in a bunch of stories about time.

Specifically it was about the cultural idea that an hour has a fixed duration, which has been embedded in European culture for several centuries. Early clocks were also markers of status and prestige, which was why Jesuit missionaries took them as gifts to Japanese lords in the 16th century.

Oba Nobunaga did not accept the clock offered to him in 1569, which may have been a political decision or may have been because he wasn’t quite sure what he would do with it. Because at the time, Japanese time used variable hours, which varied with the length of the day and the night.

Daytime had six hours, and night-time also had six hours. But how long these hours were changed at different times of the year, depending on how long day and night were. In summer, daylight hours were longer, and night-time hours shorter, and vice versa.

Such systems had been known in classical Europe and in parts of mediaeval Europe:

A timekeeping system that reflected the portion of the day that was lit by the Sun made sense in an agrarian society with little access to artificial light .

The idea of fixed hours is culturally confusing to people who are not brought up with it. The idea that the sixth hour of the day was dusk and the sixth hour of the night was dawn was coded into the language:

In the present day, the so-called “variable” hours of Edo Japan seem to be “changing” and unstable; but for the Edo period, Japanese Western hours seemed equally unstable. After all, Western hours were sometimes longer and sometimes shorter than the Japanese ones. Besides, in Edo Japan both the beginning and the end of day always occurred in the sixth hour; they were defined by this fact; akemutsu (the six of the dawn) and kuremutsu (the six of the dusk).

And so the Japanese couldn’t see the point of a striking clock that didn’t adjust to the changing hours, although they worked well as status symbols. But it didn’t take long before Japanese artisans started to ‘hack’ the European clocks to fit with Japanese time:

One version added little moveable weights to the clock’s escapement, making it possible to adjust its speed. Others allowed the users to slide the hour markers around the face, setting them appropriately for the season. And then there were the long, skinny clocks that featured graph-like diagrams embedded in the front. A marker moved up and down the side, tracing through the diagram to land on the correct time.

(Image: The Myriad Year Clock via Wikipedia)

The high point of this craft was the development of the Myriad Year Clock in 1851, by Tanaka Hisashige.

(I)ts six faces not only tell the time in Japanese variable hours and European fixed ones, but also track the periods of the Japanese solar year, the days of the week, the date in the Chinese calendar, and the phases of the moon. The hour markers for the Japanese system are self-adjusting, moving apart or crowding together depending on the time of year. Beneath a glass globe at the top, two small spheres representing the Sun and Moon revolve above a map of Japan.

And as so often, the high water mark comes just before the tide goes out completely. Japan’s system of variable hours was abolished in 1873.

But thinking about this, and the reports I see from time to time that say that humans aren’t getting enough sleep, and the impact of this on mental health, I wondered if connecting our clocks back to the natural rhythms of day and night might produce well-being benefits.

Although: we’d have to leave our precisely calibrated PNT systems running in the background.

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Other writing: music

I’ve had a couple of pieces on folk music published at Salut!Live over the holiday. One was a review of a Christmas concert of the Teeside group the Young ‘Uns, the other an account of a ‘conversation with Martin Carthy’, the vastly influential British folk guitarist. Here’s an extract from the first one:

David Eagle, who also performs as a standup comedian, is genuinely funny as he chats between the numbers. The poor woman whose phone went off as they were about to play  Tim Burman , their “one serious song” of the evening, in memory of someone who died in the Lockerbie plane bombing, was given a merciless time. “The next one’s in C, if you want to tune your mobile phones,” was just the start of it.

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j2t#529

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